80+ Forest Features For Fantasy Worldbuilding39 min read

Bark, blossom, bough, and burl!Welcome back, Outlander, to the 5th entry in Mythic Ecology, my series on how learning real-world landscape features can enrich our fantasy worldbuilding and storytelling. In this post I return to my minimalist framework for Dungeon Masters, Game Masters, fiction writers, and similar worldbuilders to merge the realms of general myth and geomorphology. Last entry we looked at rivers. As I resume my journey sketching a framework for designing Yridia, my unique D&D 5e fantasy world, let’s learn some forest terms, with a visual guide!

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PART 0: MYTHIC ECOLOGY FOR FANTASY WORLDBUILDING & STORYTELLING

In The Anatomy of Story (2007), John Truby identifies the Forest as a symbol reflecting a sort of binary archetype of awe and dread. On the one hand the benevolent woodlands, a natural cathedral, full of wisdom and contemplation. And on the other, the foreboding, labrynthine, slow deadliness of the the forest primeval. Likewise the jungle, a rather skewed trope from colonial discourse, invokes a feeling of suffocation, tropes of human as beast, and beasts surpassing humanity.

But as we’ll see, forests have enough diversity within them to cover many moods and themes. We’ll talk details, but for first let’s revisit my minimalist framework for my worldbuilding. The six archetype tags with which I will flag all the various real-world land features in my Mythic Ecology Series:

1. Settlements: habitable regions of either Work or Play, Familiar or Exotic, offering diverse narrative functions: a Day in the Life, Home Base, Personal Reasons, Gathering Supplies. Can subvert tropes with Ruins or Escape.2. Omens: sensational, temporal, or particularly pointed features that offer narrative functions of forshadowing, and good or evil portents. Can subvert tropes with a Wild Goose Chase.3. Overlooks: sites of magnitude and grandeur, living monuments which can function narratively for finding resolve, invoking spirits, or as a Call to Adventure. Can subvert tropes with Dread or Betrayal.4. Passageways: transitional journeylands, including magical portals, functioning narratively for initiation and return, thresholds and tests, shortcuts and setbacks.5. Abyss: a void or confined space presenting scarcity or temptation, desperation and danger. Can subvert tropes with a Timely Rescue or Secret Refuge.6. Battlegrounds: sites fit for epic, sprawling encounters and climax conflicts. Can subvert tropes with Alternative Solutions.

Feel free to submit your own ideas, or draw outside the lines. Alright, let’s see how forests fit in.

PART 1: TREE PARTS

Annual Ring –a tree cross-sectionfeaturing one earlywood layer (light-colored) and one latewood layer (dark-colored), representing a year of growth.[Omens]

Bark– the hard substance that covers a tree.[Omens]

Blossom – a flower on a tree, or all the flowers on a tree.[Omens]

Bole – the main trunk of a tree.[Omens, Overlooks]

Bough – a big branch on a tree.[Omens, Overlooks]

Branch – a part of a tree that grows out of its trunk with leaves, flowers, or fruit.[Omens]

Catkin – a long soft group of small flowers that hangs from the branches of some trees.[Omens]

Root – the lower, non-leaf, nodeless part of a plants body, often below the soil (but sometimes aboveground or abovewater), which helps a plant with water, nutrients, and anchoring.[Omens, Passageways, Abyss]

Understory Layer – relatively open but dark layer of young trees, bushes, shrubs,snags, and leafy herbaceous plants, supports terrestrial fauna and with waterways or clearings can become thicket.[Passageways, Abyss]

Emergent Layer – features giant crowned trees which soar above the canopy and experience high sunlight, temperatures, and winds, but lower humidity.[Omens, Overlooks]

PART 5: AGES – SNAG, OLD GROWTH, SECONDARY GROWTH

Snag Forest / Complex Early Seral Forest – marked by standing limbless or leafless trees, these develop after a natural stand-replacing disturbance like wildfire or insect outbreaks, but before a closed canopy returns, and support rich biodiversity from remaining biomass and habitat variation.[Omens, Passageways, Abyss]

Old Growth – develops over a long period without catastrophic disturbance, featuring multiple ages of trees, including very tall trees, as well as large dead standing trees, and fallen ones.[Omens, Overlooks, Passageways]

Secondary Growth – develops as recovery from large scale tree extraction, with reduced biodiversity compared to Snag Forests because of reduced nutrients, structure, and water retention.[Omens, Passageways]

PART 6: TREE GROUP TERMS

Copse – a small group of trees, especially trees cut down to stools (living stumps) which can produce shoots for periodic harvest as multiple, smaller wood regrowth segments.
[Omens, Passageways,Battlegrounds]

Grove – a small group of trees with minimal or no undergrowth.[Settlements, Omens, Passageways, Battlegrounds]

PART 10: TRANSITIONAL FORESTS

Mangrove / Mangal– coastal swamps featuring mangroves, a shrub or small tree in saline or brackish water, where fine sediment, often high in organic matter, collects in areas protected from strong waves. Discussed in Part 2: Wetlands.[Omens, Overlooks, Passageways]

PART 11: SPECIAL FORESTS

Certain tree species and rare forest types deserve extra attention for fantasy worldbuilding considerations because they show interesting possibilities already in the real world to draw upon and enhance.

Heartwood – the darker, central core of a tree, made up of dense, dead wood, which provides strength. [Omens]

Sapwood – the lighter, outer rim of a tree, made up of living wood, which transports water and minerals. [Omens]

FINAL THOUGHTS

I hope you enjoyed this fifth entry in my Mythic Ecology series! I look forward to continuing with it, I have some greater ambitions for developing this series into worldbuilding web tools. Give this a share if you liked it, and let me know in the comments if you have any feedback. I publish new posts on Tuesdays. In the meantime, I post original D&D memes and writing updates daily over on my site’sFacebook Page. Also, if you want to keep up-to-date on all my posts, check out my Newsletter Sign-Up to receive email notifications when I release new posts. A big thanks as always to my Patrons on Patreon, helping keep this project going: Anthony, Chris, Eric & Jones, Geoff, Jason, Rudy, and Tom. Thanks for your support!

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